Linda Jonsson
UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office
Linda Jonsson is an Education Specialist based in Bangkok with the UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office. In the past ten years, she has worked with UNICEF in Zambia, Niger and Cambodia, focusing on foundational learning, assessments, multilingual and inclusive education, and education sector planning. She holds a MA in International Relations and Economics from the University of St Andrews and a MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics.
Rika Yorozu
UNESCO Regional Office in Bangkok
Rika Yorozu is a Programme Specialist for Inclusive and Equitable Learning at the UNESCO Regional Office in Bangkok. Before joining UNESCO Bangkok, she worked in the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Hamburg; the Higher Education Section at UNESCO Headquarters, Paris; and the Asia-Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU), Tokyo. She has provided support to developing and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa in education strategy and development of lifelong learning policies, especially in addressing inclusive participation in adult learning and education and making youth and adult literacy programmes gender responsive. Her special interests are community learning and women’s leadership development in education. Yorozu holds an EdD from the University of Glasgow.
Dr Maria Mercedes Arzadon
Partnerships, Policies and Practices on First Language-Based Multilingual Education in Asia and the Pacific
Dr. Maria Mercedes “Ched” Estigoy Arzadon is a Filipino scholar and educator who holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Sociology of Education from the University of the Philippines. Her doctoral dissertation is an ethnographic study on the policy enactment of Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) in an indigenous school community in the Northern Philippines. She is an Associate Professor at the College of Education, University of the Philippines, and she publishes papers on multilingual education, indigenous education, alternative learning, and parental involvement.
Dr. Arzadon stands as one of the founding members of the 170+ Talaytayan MLE, a leading advocacy group for MTB-MLE, and the Society for Strategic Education Studies, an organization of Filipino educational anthropologists. She also served as the Co-Chair of the Indigenous Knowledge in Academy Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society.
Dr. Arzadon has been sought after by policymakers to contribute her expertise for policies and programs addressing the use of language in education. Recently, she participated in crafting a language curriculum for early grades, set to be implemented in 2024. She has been active in social media since the 1990s, establishing various online communities and blog sites to further her advocacies.
Dr Kirk Person
Partnerships, Policies and Practices on First Language-Based Multilingual Education in Asia and the Pacific
Kirk R. Person, Ph.D. (University of Texas, Arlington) came to Thailand in 1988 as a volunteer English teacher—and stayed! He is a Senior Consultant in Literacy and Education with SIL International, an NGO focused on minority language issues. He has conducted linguistic fieldwork throughout Southeast Asia, taught graduate linguistics courses at several Thai universities, represented SIL International to the Asia-Pacific Multilingual Education Working Group (hosted by UNESCO-Bangkok), served on the Royal Institute of Thailand’s National Language Policy Drafting Committee, contributed to the British Academy’s language policy recommendations for Myanmar, and sat on UNESCO Paris’ global language expert committee. He was an advisor to the Patani Malay-Thai Multilingual Education Programme in southern Thailand, which received the 2016 UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize.